Monitoring Opscenter Process

I am configuring a script to monitor the opscenter process, and my initial thought was to cat the opscenterd.pid file and check that the process is running. I was going to do this with Splunk. However, this pid file is owned by root and not readable (500.) I don't want Splunk to run as root. Is this ownership something I can change? Is there a 'standard' way you recommend to monitor the opscenter process?

In my tests, I'm able to check the return code 'service opscenterd status' without running as root.

If that doesn't work for you, the opscenterd service will run as the "opscenter" user if that user exists on the system. If you go that route, you'll need to be sure the opscenter user has permission to access various directories that it will need (eg, /etc/opscenter, /var/log/opscenter, etc).